Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  “Are you all right?” Vikar says, and Zazi throws herself into his chest crying.

  145.

  She composes herself and says, “Can I stay at your place, Vikar? I’ll sleep on the couch or the floor. But please don’t leave me here.”

  “There’s an extra room,” he says, “you don’t have to sleep on the floor.”

  “Can we leave now? None of this,” says Zazi, waving at the people in the house behind her, “is really about Mom anyway.”

  “All right.”

  Vikar and Zazi walk through the house and reach the front door before Rondell, at the other end of the room, says, “Isadora?”

  It’s been so long since Vikar heard her called this that at first he isn’t sure who Rondell means.

  “Isadora?” Rondell crosses the room and the talking around them fades. “What are you doing?”

  “She’s coming with me,” says Vikar.

  “Vikar?” says Rondell, inches from the other man. “I’m speaking to Zazi. Isadora, where do you think you’re going?”

  “That’s not my name,” Zazi says.

  “She’s coming with me,” Vikar says.

  “Vikar, don’t say that again. Zazi?” and Rondell grabs the girl by the arm.

  144.

  Later there will be some discussion between De Palma and Schrader as to the cinematic nature of the moment, and as to the exact sound, perhaps for the purpose of how to replicate it in a sound edit; there’s agreement about the crunching. No one disputes the sound of crunching. With the same hand that once smashed a car window with an eleven-year-old behind it, Vikar shatters one profile of Rondell or another—lately he’s become confused about the profiles—and in any case, what’s also indisputable is the bloody streak across the white carpet. No one argues about the cinematic nature of that, either. Rondell sprawls across the floor in the center of the room with blood running from his nose, everyone watching passively except Molly, who looks at Vikar ashen, as if two years of some determined and focused effort have just disappeared in an instant. Vikar walks over to deliver a swift kick to Rondell’s other profile. “Whoa there, Shane,” someone pulls Vikar back, and Vikar turns to land another blow but sees it’s Viking Man. He turns back to Rondell on the floor. “She’s coming with me,” he says.

  143.

  Zazi walks over to Rondell, who lies in a daze; she leans over and whispers something in his ear. She looks him in the eye and whispers it again, as though to make sure it’s registered. Then she strides from the house and Vikar follows.

  142.

  “That’s not my name, what he called me,” she says. By the time they’re out to the street, Viking Man has run after them.

  “Vicar,” he says, “you got a ride?”

  “I walked here,” Vikar says.

  “Let me give you a ride.” Viking Man indicates a Toyota with a surfboard on top. “I don’t think it makes sense to wait for the cops.”

  “They won’t come,” Zazi says.

  “The police never come,” agrees Vikar.

  “You fucked him up pretty good,” Viking Man says.

  “He’s not,” Zazi answers calmly, “going to call the police.”

  141.

  The last time Vikar saw his father was the night the divinity student mortified the review committee with the model church that had no door. He returned home to find the house dark: “Oh, Mother?” he called to no answer. At the top of the darkened stairs, at the edge of the bed where he lay as a small boy the night his father came into his room, Vikar now found his father sitting and holding a long knife. It gleamed in the light of the tiny lamp that stood on the night stand for as long as Vikar could remember. “Where’s Mother?” said Vikar, and turned and went into his mother’s room; the closet and drawers were cleaned out. He went back into his own room, and his father, face distorted and wet, looked at his son with the newly shaved head as though the son had become exactly what the father always knew and feared. The father turned the blade over and over in the palm of his hand, contemplating its destiny. But the blade was not for Vikar’s mother, and it was not for Vikar; and that was the moment Vikar hated God most.

  140.

  Zazi comes to live in Vikar’s house. She takes the spare bedroom on the second level; her window faces the side of the hill, so there’s not much of a view. In the mornings, Vikar cooks Zazi the Basque Breakfast that he used to eat in the middle of the night in Madrid, eggs and potatoes and chopped tomatoes out of a skillet. The first night she says to him, “Does this mean you’re not going to get to make your movie?” and Vikar, staring out at the city and at his reflection in the windows, turning his head from side to side and from profile to profile, says, “I don’t know how to direct a movie anyway. I did once before, in Spain, and it didn’t look so much like Buñuel.”

  139.

  Vikar wonders what he’ll do if the police come to try and take Zazi away. But as Zazi said, the police don’t come: If I had been singing when I hit him, they would have come. I would have sung the song from the radio about Montgomery Clift.

  138.

  Zazi is gone the next day when Vikar rises, like the time she slept in his suite at the Sherry-Netherland and all that was left in the morning was a blanket draped over the end of the couch. She returns that afternoon and is putting a Marianne Faithfull poster up in her bedroom when Vikar, standing in the doorway, says, “Did he do anything to you?” The guitar case that Zazi brought with her to the Fine Arts to see A Place in the Sun stands upright in the corner.

  She finishes with the poster and steps back to survey the result. “Is it O.K. if I put up a poster or two?”

  “You can put up what you want.”

  “No, he didn’t do anything to me,” she says, “but I’m old enough to know the look in guys’ eyes.” She chews her lip for a moment. “I’m still a virgin,” she says.

  “So am I,” says Vikar.

  137.

  Vikar goes to see a mid-sixties movie about an ex-race-car driver who teaches blind children until two hit men come to kill him. The ex-race-car driver/teacher is played by the director who told Vikar the story about hating A Place in the Sun and seeing it eight times in a row before realizing he loved it. In this film, the hit men are sent by a dark crime lord who slaps around his girlfriend; when Vikar leaves the theater, darkness has fallen and he wanders across the street into a paperback store where a television shows the same dark crime lord in another movie—until Vikar realizes it’s not a movie but the news, and that the crime lord has been elected President of the United States.

  Zazi comes and goes at all hours. She receives strange telephone calls, and sometimes strange cars pick her up at the house. Vikar has no idea how he’s supposed to take care of her; he doesn’t know what to ask or insist upon. “Shouldn’t you go to school?” he says to her one afternoon after she’s been out all night. Sitting in the kitchen eating a tuna sandwich, she nods slowly. “I don’t,” she says, even though she’s nodding, “want to go to school.” She says, “I’m learning more from being in a band.”

  “How long have you been in a band?”

  “About eight months. I’m the weak link—the others have all played awhile. The Starwood gave us the small room one night last week and Rhino may let us play their store some afternoon.” She says, “It’s your fault. I never would have seen Lora Logic and Poly Styrene at CBGB’s if you hadn’t taken Mom there.”

  He says, “I promised her I would take care of you.”

  She stops chewing the sandwich. “What?”

  “I promised your mother I—”

  “When?”

  Vikar thinks. “Five or six weeks ago.”

  “Five or six weeks ago?” She says, “You saw Mom five or six weeks ago? When were you going to mention this?”

  “I’m mentioning it now.”

  “A little late maybe?”

  He considers this. “I don’t believe so.”

  With deliberation, almost methodically, Zazi thro
ws the plate and the tuna sandwich at the kitchen wall. Just missing the cork bulletin board and the phone—where the plate breaks into pieces and leaves the wall mottled with tuna—she stalks from the house.

  136.

  She returns a few hours later and finds him down in the film library on the bottom level of the house. “Sorry,” she says. “You let me come live here and I’m acting like a teenager.”

  “You are a teenager,” says Vikar.

  “I just didn’t know you had been seeing Mom.”

  “I wasn’t seeing her. It was at a movie. She came over afterward and said take care of you.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like she knew, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “She said to take care of me.”

  “Take care of my girl if something happens, she said.”

  For a moment Zazi doesn’t move, gazing at her feet. When Vikar steps toward her, she raises one hand and he stops; for a while the two don’t speak. Finally she says, “So let’s go to another movie sometime.”

  135.

  Vikar doesn’t really want to go with Zazi to the movies again, but one night the following week they meet at the Nuart in West Los Angeles. Afterward, as they’re walking to the bus down Santa Monica Boulevard beneath the overpass of the 405, with the roar of the freeway above them, he says, “It’s all right if you didn’t like it.”

  “Actually I liked it a lot,” she says, “except one thing. I really liked the main guy, the one who runs the bar … that Bogart guy, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And actually the whole cast was really great and it was funny in places, some good lines that I’ve heard before … did all those lines come from other places, or did they come from this movie first?”

  “They came from this one first.”

  “I didn’t get the political stuff. All the stuff about the good French and bad French. But it was all pretty cool—except for this one thing.”

  “What?”

  “‘Someday you’ll understand that.’”

  “What?”

  “He says, ‘Someday you’ll understand that.’ There at the end, when the Bogart guy is telling her why she can’t stay with him, he gives this big speech about how their problems aren’t worth beans and they have to do what’s right and her place is with her husband because he’s fighting the Nazis and it’s important—and then he says, ‘Someday you’ll understand that’ … and that was kind of infuriating, if you want to know the truth. Because if you want to know the truth, she’s the one who’s understood it all along. It’s why she left him to begin with, why she’s spent the whole movie trying to explain it to him, trying to get him to understand—and now he’s telling her? It’s bullshit, it comes off as, what’s the word? sanctimonious, and Bogart, he seems a lot of things, he feels sorry for himself a lot and he’s bitter … but sanctimonious? That didn’t seem like him. He doesn’t seem like a guy who puts up with that kind of bullshit. So I just don’t think he would have said that. He would have said, ‘Finally I understand.’ Or something like that.”

  “It’s one line,” Vikar says.

  “But it’s an important line. In a way, the whole movie comes down to that line.”

  134.

  There’s a contradiction between the way things happen like a movie yet don’t feel like a movie. The things in life that are like movies have profiles as well, the profile of how they happen and the profile of how they feel. When the stranger emerges from the shadows of the 405 with the gun, Zazi lets out a small scream; out of fear for the girl, Vikar resists the inclination to reach over and gouge out the stranger’s eyes behind the stocking over his head. It’s not clear at first whether this is a burglary or an act of random violence.

  The three are motionless, there in plain sight on Santa Monica Boulevard for everyone to see and no one to bother about. It’s dark, but headlights rip across them, with nothing said until finally, from behind the stranger’s mask, Vikar and Zazi hear “Damn! Place in the Sun!” and the stranger pulls the mask off.

  133.

  Even in daylight Vikar isn’t sure he would have recognized him, but of course the other man recognizes Vikar. “Place in the Sun,” he says again, “it’s me.”

  “The Christine Jorgensen Story,” Vikar says, pointing at the man, and then, when he sees the look on the man’s face, “I’m just vexing you. My Darling Clementine. Now, Voyager.”

  132.

  The burglar laughs, “Yeah, you are vexing me. Christine Jorgensen Story, shit. Remember that?”

  “It’s been—”

  “—five, six years?”

  “Ten,” Vikar says, “eleven.”

  “No! Well, yeah, maybe. Anyway, let’s not go into that whole Christine Jorgensen thing.”

  “Your hair is shorter.”

  “Yeah, and you’re still a stone freak,” the burglar says, waving his gun at Vikar’s head, “so we won’t go into the hair either, or the way you hit me that night and tied up my ass.”

  “You stole my television.”

  “I did,” the burglar says, “what can I say? No point denying it—it didn’t get up and walk away by itself, did it?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s the little girl?”

  “She’s fourteen. She’s …”

  “A niece,” Zazi says.

  “Dig the nose ring. Say, what are you walking around here for, anyway?” the burglar says. “It’s dangerous to be walking around a place like this. You could get dusted.”

  “Yes,” Vikar says, looking at the gun.

  “What? Oh, yeah,” the burglar looks at the gun too and laughs, “well, like I’m tellin’ ya.”

  131.

  Vikar says, “Perhaps you shouldn’t use a gun around kids.”

  It’s difficult to hear over the roar of the traffic. “Now, see,” the burglar says, “I’ve given that some thought.” Sometimes when a car passes on Santa Monica Boulevard, someone inside turns to look. “On the face of things,” the burglar continues, “it would seem as you say. But the way I figure it, if I rob someone who has a kid, they’re less likely to try and get all Dirty Harry on me, you hear what I’m saying? It keeps things cool when there’s a kid.”

  “So what you’re telling us,” Zazi says, “is that it’s for their own good that you rob people with kids.”

  “Now, darling, I hear you taking a tone with me,” the burglar says, “but that’s exactly what I’m telling you. Chalk it up as one of life’s little paradoxes. You still living in the same place?”

  “No,” Vikar says, “I moved.” He says, “I’m not going to tell you where or you’ll come rob it.”

  “There you go, son,” the burglar laughs, “you’re probably right. Seen any movies lately?”

  “We just saw Casablanca. Zazi had never seen it.”

  “Wow, seeing Casablanca for the first time, imagine that. One of the fundaments of a cinematic education there, little girl. Round up the usual suspects. I came for the waters. I was misinformed. I stick my neck out for nobody. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I’m shocked, shocked that there’s gambling going on. Here’s looking at you. We’ll always have Paris. Play it, Sam, you played it for her, now you can play it for me.”

  “Someday you’ll understand that,” Zazi says.

  “Huh?”

  “Another line from the movie.”

  “I don’t remember that one. Who said that? You sure you have the right picture? Check it out,” the burglar says to Zazi, his words sometimes lost in the sound of the freeway, “my man Bogart, he was a whole different cat than anyone had seen in movies up to that point. Cagney was complicated but Bogart was neurotic. You don’t get from Gable to Brando without going through Bogart, you hear what I’m saying?”

  “I know where Gable and Bogart are buried,” Vikar says, then, remembering Jayne Mansfield, “at least I believe I do. When Gable killed a man in an auto accident, the stu
dio got someone else to take the fall.”

  “Course,” says the burglar, “everyone now knows they had no idea at the time they were making any kind of classic. When it got the Oscar, everyone was shocked—figured the Oscar folks dropped the ball, like they were slumming or something to give it to something they thought was barely better than a B-picture. As it turns out, other than maybe Lawrence of Arabia that was the only time the Oscars did get it right, except they should have laid one on my man Humphrey while they were at it.”

  “He was nominated for an Oscar,” Zazi says.

  “But he didn’t get it, little girl.”

  “No. He was nominated.” She points at Vikar. Vikar didn’t know she knew.

  “Who?” The burglar looks at Vikar, stunned.

  “It wasn’t for best actor,” says Vikar.

  “What was it for?”

  “Editing,” says Zazi.

  Vikar says, “I didn’t win.”

  “Man, are you shitting me? You were nominated for an Oscar?” The burglar stomps his feet with excitement. “I’ve never known anyone who was nominated for an Oscar! Put it there!” He changes gun hands and puts out the free hand and Vikar slaps it. “For what movie?”

  “It was called Your Pale Blue Eyes.”

  “Yeah, I saw that picture. Didn’t understand a goddamned thing about it. But then I’ve never been nominated for an Oscar, so fuck me, right? What won?”

  “Uh,” thinks Vikar.

  “The Deer Hunter,” says Zazi. Vikar looks at her.

  “Oh, well, that was the big picture that year, jack,” says the burglar. “You weren’t going to win against that.”